Wed, 02 Feb 2005

Smoking causes cognitive impairment in adolescents

Hmmm... interesting study. It certainly explains alot about some famous citizens, but I gotta wonder if Einstein and Edison were so imparied? Perhaps Churchill and JFK couldn't keep any information in their minds and manipulate it. It's obvious that JRR Tolkien couldn't!

Oscar Wilde obviously was affected: he's universally remembered as a half-wit, eh? And Whoppi Goldberg can't remember her lines because of her cigar. Even to Freud, sometimes a cigar was just a cigar! Obviously his famed psychoanalytic connections were misfiring due to excessive nicotine!

Hopefully none of the sarcasm above dripped off the screen and gummed up your keyboard, but I just couldn't help myself. This study is not about smoking, it's about the justification of political goals. In fact, so is every study using the methodology described here: it's a game of statistical pick and choose, where any data can be made to fit the initial hypothesis. And it's being done quite deliberately.

It didn't start with smoking, and it's not going to end there. It's modern genesis can be traced to the incipient drug war of the 1930's - the alcohol prohibition movement was at least honest enough to use political means without disguising it's motives as scientific. But the drug wars have always been supported by these kinds of "studies" - and smoking was a natural followup. Nicotine is, after all, as much of a drug as THC.

But while the drug wars may have built the Matterhorn, the smoking wars covered it with axel grease - and we're now facing the slippery slope to Hel, where any human activity can be condemned and vilified with "scientific" justification. The movement is already starting against obesity.

What's going to be interesting is watching the public reaction as certain groups with an overtly political/religious agenda start picking up these methodologies to attack their particular bogeymen. Interestingly enough, I believe that the first target these folks have in mind is the gay community.

These kinds of movements can have serious incidential consequences. For example, while the government bans smoking indoors for better "indoor air quality", they eviscerate enviromental programs to reduce or eliminate smog. And using statistics they'll "prove" that we're much "healthier" than we were before they took political action!

As my friend Kathryn pointed out in reaction to a recent story also covered here:

I'm not a smoker. I don't like it, I think it's dangerous, and I think it's a gross habit. However, this news alarms me ... What's next? Random cholesterol checks? This is a very slippery slope.

A very slippery slope, indeed.

Adolescents who smoke show impairment of memory and other cognitive functions, according to a Yale study in Biological Psychiatry. More than 4.5 million teenagers smoke cigarettes in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and the U.S. Census Bureau. Leslie Jacobsen, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine, and her research team tested working memory. This form of memory is used when keeping information in mind and manipulating it. They also evaluated verbal learning and memory, attention, mood, symptoms of nicotine withdrawal and tobacco cravings in 41 adolescent daily smokers and 32 nonsmokers. The groups were similar in age, gender and education.

(link) [Science Blog - Research News in Science, Health, Medicine, Space, Physics and More]

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